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2006

Atanarjuat and the Ideological Work ofContemporary Indigenous FilmmakingMonika SiebertUniversity of Richmond, msiebert@richmond.edu

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Recommended CitationSiebert, Monika, "Atanarjuat and the Ideological Work of Contemporary Indigenous Filmmaking" (2006). English Faculty Publications.57.http://scholarship.richmond.edu/english-faculty-publications/57

Monika Siebert

Syracuse University

Atanarjuat and the Ideological Work of Contemporary Indigenous Film-Making.

Going Inuit

Canada’s ongoing attempts to go native have recently culminated in the ilanaaq,i

the official logo of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games to take place in Vancouver, British

Colombia. A contemporary rendition of inukshuk, a traditional Inuit stone marker,

ilanaaq is meant to represent: “hope, friendship and […] the hospitality of a nation that

warmly welcomes the people of the world with open arms.”ii Nothing to argue with,

really, and yet the logo has already proven controversial. Disagreement concerns two

issues: ilanaaq’s ability to represent all of Canada—the facility with which it replaces the

maple leaf proved irksome to some constituencies—and its relationship to other First

Nations—the Squamishiii

have charged that ilanaaq exemplifies a particularly egregious

instance of symbolic favoritism as it replaces abundantly available representations of the

West Coast indigeneity with an emblem imported from the Arctic North. The Vancouver

Organizing Committee has come to eloquent defense of ilanaaq by invoking its symbolic

integrationist potential: “Ilanaaq's strength comes from the teamwork and collaboration

of many. Each stone relies on the others to support the whole, but the unified balance is

strong and unwavering.” The Inuit have become Canada’s favorite indigenes because

their political history and their cultural symbols lend themselves so well to Canada’s

ongoing federalist project.

Ilanaaq is the latest North American example of “playing Indian” (Deloria 1998),

a practice with vast historical precedent. With ilanaaq, Canada joins a host of nations who

have turned to symbols of local indigeneity to assert their national distinctiveness. Such

2

appropriation presents indigenous artists with a dilemma. The current flowering of

indigenous letters, art and cinema in North America is generally taken as evidence that

Canada and the United States, as thriving multiculturalist democracies, have broken with

an earlier history of the expropriation and displacement of the Americas’ indigenous

peoples. The art bears witness to a new historical period, in which respect for difference

becomes the dominant logic of social and cultural relations. But this new historical period

comes with a price of its own. Multiculturalism effectively demands that American

Indians put their indigeneity on display. It prohibits Euroamericans from playing

Indian—all such attempts are quickly denounced as cultural appropriation; ethnic frauds

are regularly and ritually exposed these days. Instead, it requires that the Indians

themselves play Indian to help legitimate the multiculturalist democracies they cannot

help but inhabit.

But how does an Indian play Indian? Atanarjuat. The Fast Runner, Zacharias

Kunuk’s feature debut provides an intriguing opportunity to investigate this question.

Despite the wide-spread critical acclaim it has garnered since its showing at Cannes in

2000, where it won Camera d’Or, Kunuk’s film continues to pose somewhat of a puzzle.

Unique among contemporary North American indigenous cinema, both in terms of its

subject matter and its formal solutions, Kunuk’s film raises important questions about the

possibilities of indigenous self-representation in contemporary multicultural democracies

without offering easy answers. In fact, the ideological valence of the film appears

outright contradictory and that contradiction is embodied most vividly in the

juxtaposition of The Fast Runner’s main narrative depicting a pre-contact nomadic band

of the Inuit and the film’s outtakes chronicling the making of the feature itself.

3

Atanarjuat. The Fast Runner, as the title already hints, participates in two separate

traditions of representating the indigenous. It flees modernity into mythic indigenous past

and then runs towards contemporary Canada as it unabashedly claims modernity in the

outtakes concluding the film. Kunuk’s film urgently poses the question of representing

indigeneity under the conditions of multiculturalist democracies which enlist recognition

on behalf of national cohesion rather than on behalf of cultural and political autonomy of

indigenous nations.

A creation of Isuma Productions Inc., Canada’s first independent Inuit production

company,iv

Atanarjuat. The Fast Runner has been marketed as the first feature film

written, directed, acted, and produced by the Inuit. A cinematographic reprise of a

traditional Inuit morality tale passed down orally through many generations, the film has

been billed as “part of this continuous stream of oral history carried forward into the new

millennium through a marriage of Inuit storytelling skills and new technology.” “An

exciting action-thriller (!) set in ancient Igloolik,” it has promised “international

audiences a more authentic view of Inuit culture and oral tradition than ever before, from

the inside and through Inuit eyes.”v

The film fascinates with its attempt to sustain an illusion of a pre-contact world in

what is today’s Canada’s Eastern Arctic for its entire 2 hours and 41 minutes. It

accomplishes this goal by throwing non-Inuit and non-Inuktitutvi

speaking viewers into a

world that does not offer them recognizable parameters of orientation: no native

informant here. The promise of understanding held out by the English subtitles shatters

with the first translated message: a declaration by an elder storyteller that she can tell this

story only to those who already understand it, but to no others. The disjointed editing of

4

the opening sections augments the impression of being at a loss in an unknown world, as

the Southernvii

viewer struggles to reconstruct the plots from the offered fragments.viii

The

film unfolds as a story about an interfamily feud precipitated by an evil curse and a

dispute over a woman. But above all, it works as a representation of the ancient material

world recreated with meticulous attention to the accuracy effect of ethnographic detail by

contemporary Igloolik’s craftsmen and celebrated by the camera’s loving lingering over

the details of everyday objects. Reconstructions of traditional seal and polar bear skin

clothing adorned by intricate embroidery; caribou bone, skin and ligament sleds and

kayaks; snow-block igloos built in the traditional manner as well as attention to details

large and small, from the landscapes of women’s tattooed faces to the physiognomy of

the eastern Arctic, uninterrupted by any signs of alternate economies—these all build the

film’s credibility as a recreation of a specific past. The storyline itself matters to the

extent that it evokes the classical epics and their preoccupation with governable

communities, which allows the reviewers to juxtapose claims of exotic authenticity with

assurances about the universal qualities of the tale. But it is this very ability to create and

sustain a believable pre-contact Inuit world that is typically singled out as the film’s

greatest achievement.

The Formal Puzzle of Atanarjuat.

With its plot unfolding in pre-modern past, Atanarjuat is unique among

contemporary indigenous films in North America. Other works directed by indigenous

filmmakers or based on texts by American Indian writersix

situate their plots in the

present and depict indigenous individuals and communities negotiating material and

cultural legacies of American imperialism. Their ideological work is plain to see. On the

5

heels of a long history of representing indigenous peoples as vanishing emblems of a pre-

modern past (think of such historical dramas as Dances with Wolves (1990) or Black

Robe (1991), the entire US Western tradition, or the early ethnographic film), these films

insist that Native peoples are here still. In their uncompromising portrayals of reservation

or urban realities, of communities and individuals suffering from unemployment,

poverty, alcoholism, and alienation, alongside stories of material survival and cultural

resistance, Native film has aimed to reinsert indigenous people into the material realities

and historical time of North America. And yet, because of the unvarnished treatment of

these subjects, these films often meet with sharp critique by Native intellectuals for

serving up negative stereotypes of American Indians or for their inability to narrate the

Native present from an uncompromisingly Native point of view.

In this context, Kunuk’s choice to shed the trappings of modernity with its settler

presence and invoke instead a pre-contact Inuit world could be read as an effort to

articulate a categorically indigenist point of view. By locating the narrative far enough in

the past, Atanarjuat refuses to narrate the obliteration of the traditional way of life.

Instead, it indulges in a fantasy of a world as yet not destroyed by colonization. And yet

one wonders about the contemporary uses of such representations. However attractive

such a vision might be, considering the long tradition of allochronic representation of

indigenous peoples in Western visual media, most flagrantly and famously evidenced in

photographs by Edward S. Curtis, an insistence on the mythic indigenous past must

appear as a vexed choice. In Curtis’ photographs and his 1914 film about the Northwest’s

Kwakwaka’wakw, In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), as in a host of other

ethnographies of the early twentieth century, the indigenous “real” is firmly associated

6

with the period before the arrival of the colonizing armies and settler communities, as if

the very fact of conquest annulled any possibility of continuous authentic indigeneity.

This is why Native commentators have worried that insistence on the narratives of the

past diverts one’s attention from the present and invites a continued ignorance of the

ongoing struggles of the Native peoples to reclaim their land (Lyons 2002).

Why would an Inuit filmmaker and his 90% Inuit crewx—dedicated to building

independent Inuit media, dedicated, more broadly, to Inuit cultural and economic

empowerment—commit themselves fully to a representational strategy compromised by

mainstream ethnographic and popular film and criticized by Native intellectuals

clamoring for representations of unblighted indigenous life in the present? What useful

ideological work does a sustained image of an indigenous pre-conquest past make

possible beyond the current truism about the need of native communities to reclaim

mainstream representational modes in order to record their history?

The puzzle posed by Atanarjuat does not end here, though, because whatever

useful ideological work an ancient tale told by the Inuit themselves performs, the film

seems to undermine that work in its final moments. Atanarjuat concludes with outtakes

showing Inuit actors and filmmakers in contemporary garb availing themselves expertly

of the most modern means of representation, and the effect of these several clips is to

shatter whatever illusions of utopian access to the real the film’s main narrative might

have inspired in the viewers. The outtakes insist on the re-creation of traditional

practices, on the Inuit past as a carefully staged performance. They display Inuit

technological expertise, which immediately showcases thorough embeddedness in

contemporary settler life, black leather jackets, portable CD players, digital cameras and

7

all. The outtakes take for granted a special cultural dexterity of the actors and filmmakers,

who move in and out of Inuktitut and English, in and out of representations of

contemporary and ancient Eastern Arctic. They also pose the question of “the real” or

“the authentic” of indigeneity: then or now, then and now, or perhaps, precisely, in the

gap between these two temporal realms. The puzzle, then: Why offer an almost three

hour long narrative of the Inuit mythical past, an artistic choice already weighted with

ideological consequences, only to undermine it in the film’s concluding minutes by sixty

seconds of explosive self-reflexivity?

What is unprecedented in Kunuk’s formal decision is the juxtaposition of these

two representational strategies. The self-reflexive mode is rather common to indigenous

film-making, which distinguishes itself from more author-oriented settler culture cinema

by insisting on its community-authored nature and its function as a form of social action,

what Faye Ginsburg has called embedded aesthetics (Ginsburg 2003). Kunuk’s video

work appears fully invested in that aesthetic. His 1989 Qaggiq and 1991 Nunagpa, both

productions for the local Inuit TV channel, combine historical reconstruction narratives

with representations of how settler culture changed Inuit communities. Atanarjuat

represents a departure from this cinematographic practice: the historical reconstruction

becomes formally separated from the narrative of Inuit modernity. The outtakes do work

to interrupt the illusion of the autonomous pre-contact world, but this unmasking of

authentic indigeneity as performance is maximally delayed; in fact, it risks being missed

altogether by impatient viewers who leave the screening rooms as soon as the final

credits begin to roll. Why, then, painstakingly reconstruct a pre-colonial past

characterized by Inuit economic and social self-sufficiency, only to complement, or

8

contradict, it by a brief concluding narrative of the Inuit’s inextricable and even joyous

participation in the Canadian present? And if that final correction of perspective is

ultimately crucial, why is it so fleeting, merely a cinematic footnote rather than a defining

feature of the film? What kind of ideological investments, what contradictions embedded

in the effort to represent contemporary indigeneity, does this unique formal strategy

attempt to solve?

Rhetorical sovereignty

One way of answering these questions would be to suggest that Atanarjuat is

engaged in a deliberate exercise of what Scott Lyons has called rhetorical sovereignty: a

people’s right to determine “their own communicative needs and desires, to decide for

themselves the goals, modes, styles and languages of public discourse;” a right that

presumes an Indian voice employing Native language, “speaking in an ongoing context

of colonization and setting at least some of the terms of the debate”(Lyons 2000:462).

The outtakes, we might argue, function precisely as one such effort to set the terms of

discourse on indigeneity: they show the Inuit representing their usable past within the

context of the contemporary multicultural Canada—and doing so with the financial

support of its governmental institutions.xi

Once we read the outtakes as a gesture of rhetorical sovereignty, Atanarjuat will

appear as a succession of narrative strategies, each deployed to contest dominant settler

modes of representing the Inuit. The outtakes bring the body of the film into their project

of autoethnography; they command viewers to reevaluate what they have just seen, to

recognize it as something other than a quixotic pursuit of an uncontaminated Inuit past

condemned to mimic the conventional representations of the indigenous familiar from the

9

settler popular culture and early ethnography. Because it emerges in response to the

dominant culture’s representations of the indigenous and consequently incorporates the

colonizer’s idiom, autoethnography is not an “authentic” form of self-representation;

rather, it constitutes the group’s point of entry into metropolitan literate culture (Pratt

1992). As such it presents minority artists with advantages and limitations. It offers them

an opportunity to speak back to the dominant culture in an idiom that culture already

understands. But runs the risk of reinforcing the reigning ideology, not to mention the

economic and social systems this ideology sustains, the very systems that have

historically been inimical to the survival of indigenous societies. By making its very

categories of thought legitimate through use, this strategy makes it harder to imagine, let

alone put to use, a radically different worldview, a viable alternative to the dominant

social and cultural arrangements. Thus indigenous artists have confronted a particularly

vicious trap, a defining dilemma of all autoethnographic texts: assertions of traditionally

indigenous forms of expression, such as orality, as defining Indian authenticity

effectively cast the literate Indians as cultural half-breeds; and yet a turn to the

majoritarian conventions of expression seems inevitable as the claims to political and

cultural sovereignty have to be addressed to the colonizer and in their very formulation

depend on the colonizer’s political discourse.

Atanarjuat’s autoethnographic investment is evident and it begins with the

employment of Inuktitut and digital video technology. While Inuktitut privileges the

putative subaltern subject by shifting the discourse onto indigenous linguistic terrain and

places the non-Inuktitut speaking viewers as outsiders without easy entry into the film’s

fictional world, in Kunuk’s own estimation, the digital camera technology resolves the

10

contradiction between orality and literacy. It allows for an entry of traditional Inuit story-

telling into modernity bypassing altogether the question of textuality as a supposed

marker of civilization. Digital video makes it possible to replace traditional story-telling,

not with a written text, but with a visual representation of traditional story-telling.

Kunuk’s film speaks to the metropolitan subjects and gets to define the context and mode

of this dialogue. This is what it means to speak of autoethnography, then: in an openly

metafictional mode, the concluding outtakes break away from the historical narrative to

represent its very production. These concluding shots of actors and filmmakers at work

force us to re-envision the entire film as a project in representing not only an authentic

indigenous past but also, and more importantly, contemporary indigenous people making

collective decisions about representing their past and present.

The recreated tale of Atanarjuat itself, too, testifies to a conscious auto-

ethnographic strategy deployed in at least two ways: it attempts to tell a universal tale

recognizable to the “South” and to offer an alternative to Southern ethnographic

conventions. To mark themselves as subjects within the dominant discourse rather than

just victims subject to it (Powell 2002), the filmmakers take up the middle ground

between their tribal culture and the settler society. Atanarjuat’s outtakes stake such an in-

between positioning and foreground indigenous agency: no longer objects of a white

ethnographic discourse, the Inuit tell of their own past. The tale of Atanarjuat works more

as a shrewd deployment of recognizably Southern narrative conventions, both filmic and

literary, rather than as an effort to elide the South. The South, which disappeared from the

diegesis, reappears at the level of form.

11

The most obvious among these conventions is the ethnographic one, dating back

to well before the invention of the kinetoscope, and coming to some culmination in

Flaherty’s 1922 film, Nanook of the North, the first feature-length documentary about the

indigenous people of the American Far North and an overt exercise in salvage

ethnography, a concerted effort to document the everyday life of a vanishing indigenous

people. Atanarjuat explicitly takes up specific narrative segments of Nanook. The visual

allusions pile up: dogs get kicked, raw meat gets eaten, knives and sled runners get

licked, igloos go up, the camera lingers over the ethnographic detail of tattooed faces and

hand-crafted tools. And yet, while reproducing these documentary conventions, the film,

by replaying some scenes with a difference and omitting others completely, offers a

subtle critique of same. For example, in the “getting ready for bed” scene in Nanook, the

ethnographic verges on the pornographic, as early 20th century viewers can be safely

titillated by a display of a woman’s bare breasts because the indigenous woman is

figured as an ethnographic specimen rather than a person. Atanarjuat stages an identical

scene very differently: what in Nanook was one more testimony to the supposedly

timeless routine of a not-quite people, in Atanarjuat becomes an opportunity to play out a

specific plot of planned revenge, and later, a pretext to illustrate the capacity for

forgiveness and reconciliation; human unpredictability, in other words, rather than

animal-like embededness in natural cycles.

Atanarjuat’s filmmakers also omit all of the scenes of contact: the trading-post

scenes and, most conspicuously, the indigenous encounter with Southern technology. In

Flaherty’s film the trading-post scene, in which an Inuit child gets sick after gorging on

biscuits and lard offered by the trader, only then to be cured by the medicine administered

12

by that same trader,xii

works almost at cross purposes. On one hand it offers an early

version of what has later become the dominant Canadian official discourse on the Inuit:

an illustration of the Inuit as hapless victims of modernization that put an end to the self-

sustaining nomadic life, a people in need of governmental care to manage successive

waves of starvation and disease decimating them. But it illustrates as well the dynamic

that gave rise to that discourse and exposes it as self-serving. After all, the trader

functions as a solution to a problem that he has precipitated in the first place, just as the

Canadian state’s move into the Eastern Arctic in the 1950s and 1960s, nominally to deal

with the mounting epidemics, was only the latest stage in the ongoing process of drawing

these not-yet-colonized lands and their populations into the settler administrative

networks (Brody 1977).

The notorious gramophone scene in Nanook of the North, in which Nanook

pretends to see the gramophone for the first time by biting the record not once but three

times, establishes another staple of ethnographic thinking about the indigenous: their

fundamental state of authentic separateness—the naiveté of the freshly discovered—

combined with a natural curiosity about the wonders of Western technology. Kunuk’s

decision to construct a pre-contact narrative makes it possible to believably omit such

scenes and break away, even if only for an imaginative moment, from the political

discourses they sustain. The point of these omissions, again, is not so much to arrive at a

story of uncontaminated indigenous culture—the final outtakes decisively shut down that

possibility—not, that is, to indulge in what rightly can be named a fantasy of

disentanglement with the South, but rather to assert rhetorical sovereignty, to tell a story

13

of the indigenous past without appropriating all of the structural elements of the North-

South narrative.

The second convention at work in the film is the epic deployed in a universalizing

gesture that collapses the presupposed difference between us and them and indulges the

white viewer with the cherished fantasy of adoption into the tribe. Judging by the

reviewers,xiii

it seems that the mainstream public would like to have it both ways, a film

that plays up the exotic otherness of the Inuit and reveals a reassuring universality at the

core of their particular experience, a universality that becomes a passport required for the

Inuit entry to the rest of Canada and the world. The conventions of the epic deployed in

Atanarjuat play to this desire on the part of the mainstream viewer, but at the same time

illustrate the rhetorical dilemma of the indigenous artist’s engagement with the settler

culture’s representational conventions. Historically, the epic has been bound up with the

cultural work of nation building. The epics have been used to underwrite a people’s

claims to nationhood and sovereignty. Because it was released in 1999, when Canada’s

Northern Territory was divided to give Nunavut administrative independence, Atanarjuat

registers as a claim to cultural distinctiveness meant to bolster the emergence of the first

self-governing province with an Inuit voting majority in Canada. It thus functions as an

expression of both a universalist and a nationalist impulse; it is the Inuit claim to global

visibility and status of a distinct culture and society, in a move that turns what I identified

earlier as the white viewers’ contradictory expectation of simultaneous exoticity and

universality into the filmmakers’ conscious strategy; a kind of pact even made with the

Southern viewer, which allows each to have it both ways. What the film stages for us,

14

then, is the inseparability of the claims on behalf of universalism and particularity within

the specific rhetorical conditions of multiculturalist capitalist democracies.

Cunning of Recognition

Multiculturalism requires a narrative of cultural distinctiveness for the very

belonging in a nation. This requirement found its apt expression in the 1982 Constitution,

which proclaimed Canada a multicultural nation of distinct societies. The Inuit produce

an epic in order to establish their prior distinctiveness, but this epic also evidences a kind

of generic integration, roughly analogous to the political incorporation everywhere

demanded of North America’s indigenous peoples. Atanarjuat is intelligible as

“authentically Inuit” only via its recourse to the dominant epic and ethnographic

conventions. The three-hour narrative of the pre-modern past functions to underwrite the

claim of participation in Canadian modernity staked out by the closing sequences of the

film. Thus the film and the outtakes are fundamentally of a piece, two separate parts of

the same rhetorical strategy. Atanarjuat. The Fast Runner exemplifies the insight that

there is no eluding “Europe,” “The West,” “The South” or whatever we choose to call

political and cultural formations brought to the Americas by the settler communities.

Rhetorical sovereignty functions only within the horizon of multiculturalism and its

politics of recognition. And perhaps this is precisely why some of the contemporary

Native intellectuals want nothing less than to “to delete sovereignty from [their]

vocabulary once and for all.”xiv

To say as much, though, is already to insist on a different perspective. The

rhetorical sovereignty argument does not tell the entire story of the film’s ideological

functions. If rhetorical sovereignty hinges on an emphatic engagement with the present to

15

clear space for discursive, social, political and economic autonomy for indigenous

people, serious investment in the narratives of the past that rely on representational

strategies borrowed from settler culture, even as they work to contest settler fantasies,

must seem like useful energy displaced. Why not make films such as Shelley Neri’s

Honey Mocassins, which takes upon itself to thematize up front the issues that are dealt in

The Fast Runner in brief 60 seconds of the outtakes? Why edit out altogether the

narrative of the colonization and gradual disappearance of the traditional lifeways and the

serious critique of Canada’s ongoing exploitation of the First Nations’ land such a

narrative would imply? Why not follow the lead of Alanis Obomsavin’s documentary

about the Mohawk standoff at Oki, 270 Years of Resistance, which puts the political

questions concerning First Nations first and foremost? Perhaps these omissions are

precisely the key to The Fast Runner’s acclaim among the Canadian film establishment,

an acclaim testified to by numerous awards. If the film’s primary ideological investment

is Inuit sovereignty, rhetorical, cultural, political, and economic, why has the film been so

eagerly embraced by the official critical establishment, especially through its connection

to Canada’s National Film Board, a government-funded institution interested in nation-

building, that is, in integrative rather than liberatory projects? After all, the story the main

film tells is emphatically anti-multiculturalist; it is an account of a community re-

constituting itself through a forced expulsion of its insubordinate members, an account in

which difference is literally demonized, i.e., made into a demon. Embodied by an evil

shaman from the North stumbling into the Inuit band and precipitating patricide,

difference is clearly inimical to the survival of the group; it takes several years and heroic

effort on the part of the protagonist to restore the social balance within his community.

16

The main story hardly functions as a manual about transformation of social arrangements

to accommodate difference. If the film embodies an instance of rhetorical sovereignty for

the Inuit, what kind of ideological functions does it perform for Canada’s establishment

multiculturalism, unequivocally invested in creating at least the impression of a nation of

distinct yet equal societies bound in a single federation?

The very autoethnographic conventions deployed by the filmmakers to assert

rhetorical sovereignty bespeak an entanglement with the Canadian politics of recognition

and the varied modes of political co-optation such politics necessitates. This link, while

seemingly inevitable, is also troubling: several scholars, indigenous and non-native alike,

have pointed out that this multiculturalist project is inimical to the political and cultural

goals associated with indigenous sovereignty.xv

This is so because in practice it has led to

further dependence of the contemporary indigenous economies on the economy and

political culture of a capitalist democracy that is Canada, effectively undermining any

potential for alternate modes of economic, political and social organization.

Multiculturalism has elided any forms of difference that would matter in spheres other

than symbolic.

The Fast Runner, then, has to be considered in the context of what Elizabeth

Povinelli (2002) has called the cunning of recognition. Povinelli, who studied the

Australian brand of this cultural predicament, explains that the concept of the indigenous

plays a crucial role in debates over multiculturalism by “purifying the ideal image of the

nation [rather] that offering a counter-national form”(26). This process of national

redemption confronts indigenous people with an impossible task: identification with a

putatively authentic past that can only be performatively resurrected, and in the context in

17

which some of the customary practices are either prohibited by laws or found

unacceptable by the public sense of decency, or both (Povinelli 2002).

In his tellingly titled recent book, A Way of Life That Does Not Exist. Canada and

the Extinguishment of the Innu (2003), Colin Samson identifies a similar dynamic in the

Canadian government’s treatment of an unrecognizedxvi

indigenous group in Labrador,

the Innu. In Canada the politics of recognition renders the indigenous visible within the

nation’s political and legal discourses "only long enough to redeem their colonizers and

give conscience and meaning to what is in effect a bargain involving the disappearance of

real difference and Native sovereignty in exchange for a place in the mosaic of Canadian

multiculturalism”(Samson 2003:328). A good example of this dynamic is gathering of the

Innu, former hunter-gatherers onto permanent settlements where they are separated from

the lands which constituted the basis for their culture's cosmology as well as everyday

practices and compressed into villages without access to sustainable employment and

education. As in the case of Australia, the multiculturalist discourse of recognition in

Canada is really no more than another attempt at extinguishmentxvii

of the radical claims

to native sovereignty so that the “historical work of Canadian Federation can continue on

what effectively are the purloined ancestral homelands of the indigenous peoples”

(Samson 2003:9). Multiculturalist policies and rhetoric function as a cover-up for a

continuing usurpation of the land, no longer protected, in theory, if never in practice, by

the native title. The nation cedes a space for the indigenous in the national imaginary so

that it continues to have unobstructed access to the land; symbolic recognition ends up at

the service of continuing material exploitation.

18

The very language of indigenous political and cultural empowerment, endorsed

by the Canadian public media, obscures the history of forced policies of cultural

assimilation and potentially eases the white liberal conscience, plagued by worries about

intruding on indigenous turf (Samson 2003). This intertwining of discourses of self-

determination with integrative impulses seems to be a matter of tradition. Robert

Flaherty’s comments on Nanook are an early example, at least for the Arctic, of such

colonization through political emancipation. When he suggested that he wanted to show

the Inuit “not from the civilized point of view, but as they saw themselves, as “we, the

people’” (qtd. in Rony 1996:18), Flaherty projected a kind of Jeffersonian ideal of self-

determination while also falling back on the most hackneyed distinction between the

civilized and the barbarians. The Inuit on this logic are radically other and potentially the

same, amenable to the same social and political modes of organization, while retaining

their fundamentally non-modern “nature.” Contemporary celebration of Native agency by

Canadian media shifts the responsibility for what in effect are changes desired by and

benefiting the Canadian statexviii

onto the indigenous themselves so that the state cannot

be blamed for the adverse effects these transformations often have on Native

communities. The very notion of indigenous sovereignty—political, cultural, rhetorical—

ends up completing the historic work of the Canadian federation (Samson 2003). The

indigenous thus fully frame the settler culture. First, they provide it with a past to match

the European national genealogies: in that sense, the historical narrative of The Fast

Runner in addition to underwriting Canadian claims to an enlightened relationship to its

indigenous peoples also provides Canada itself with a genealogy, its own indigenous

ancestors, so to speak. But the indigenous also furnish Canada with a future, a means of

19

marking the new world’s difference from the old: as a multiculturalist democracy fully

delivering on its claims of being a nation of distinct yet equal societies, Canada emerges

as a viable alternative to the majority of European nations which continue to insist on the

republican integrationist rather than pluralist models of national belonging, despite their

rapidly changing populations. What the indigenous get in turn is the access to Canadian

administrative structures, which allow them to participate, now out of political maturity,

in the ongoing work of the state’s political and economic self-consolidation, all the while,

newly without any official obstruction, performing their cultural difference.

In this context, the image projected in The Fast Runner’s outtakes—the image,

that is, of self-empowered indigenous communities believably performing their past—

hardly functions as a critique of the multiculturalist brands of cultural and political

colonization. It is, rather, a necessary corollary to those projects. The Fast Runner cannot

help but become complicit in Canada’s nation-building and global self-promotion. This is

not an unwitting complicity, of course. Most of the Inuit-authored political documents

dating back to early 1970s testify to a deliberate deployment of this strategy. The Inuit

have typically cast their aspirations for autonomy in the context of political and economic

participation in Canadian nation. Canadian historians have dubbed this approach the

“genius of Inuit politics” and see it as crucial to the emergence of Nunavut as a self-

governing territory (Miller 2000). It has also been favorably contrasted with more

explicitly oppositional tactics of the First Nations in Southern Canada. Yet this approach

has been sharply criticized by indigenous governance scholars. Taiaiake Alfred (1999),

for example, insists on the wrongheadedness of any political strategy that accommodates

the state’s founding political framework. For Alfred, adoption of Western notions of

20

sovereignty simply works too retrench Western forms of political authority, moving the

indigenous still father away from their own traditions of governance.

The Fast Runner plays into the hands of the Canadian multiculturalist project not

only through the, by this historical juncture, requisite version of the contemporary

ethnography asserted in the outtakes, but also through the mythical epic narrative of the

Inuit past, despite the tale’s overtly anti-multiculturalist tenor. The cunning of recognition

requires authentic indigeneity that is rendered emblematic through a paradoxical

identification with a putatively vanished cultural formation (Povinelli 2000). This task is

paradoxical because the entry to modernity is premised for the indigenous on

incontrovertible identification with a past that has been both exoticized and suppressed.

The indigenous are called upon to establish cultural distinctiveness and, by this act of

particularly dexterous cultural performance, they earn the right to political representation

within a multicultural democracy, in other words, a right to equivalence, at least in theory

(of democratic politics).

The marker of authenticity established by ethnographers and the settler public is

an impossible ideal, an idea of the indigenous that reaches out for its referent not to

contemporary surviving indigenous communities but to the time before conquest. xix

It

thus establishes indigeneity as simultaneously visible and irrelevant, necessary but

anachronistic, or better, necessarily anachronistic. To paraphrase Bill Readings, we could

say: to live in Nunavut means to have been Inuit once (1997:42). Main mythical narrative

thus cannot help but also register as a response to this requirement. The cunning of

recognition is such that if in the past the indigenous were overtly compelled to serve

these functions, now they appear to choose to do so. Their willing participation is deemed

21

an act of self-determination, self-empowerment and political maturity. In a political

context so wrought with the dangers of cooptation, Atanarjuat. The Fast Runner cannot

unambiguously serve as an instance of successfully deployed contemporary indigenous

agency. Rather, it provides a map of the contradictory forces characterizing the terrain on

which exercise of such sovereignty is necessarily undertaken as it raises the question of

indigenous resistance to cultural and political domination within multiculturalist

democracies.

Resistance or Cooptation?

This dynamic of resistance and cooptation is played out clearly even when we

simply consider the question of the representational medium. According to Kunuk, digital

video technology opened new possibilities of self-representation for the indigenous by

allowing them to move directly from the oral to visual. But it has also inserted indigenous

filmmakers into the history of Canadian national cinema and its political economy.

Kunuk’s film takes on added meaning on the background of a concerted effort in Canada,

unfolding over the last thirty years, to establish a national cinema through creation of

festivals, compilation of “Ten Best” lists (in 1984 and 1993) as well as financial support

through a variety of governmental organizations. At stake in that effort has been a

"publicly recognizable body of Canadian [feature] film"(Gittings 2002:3), especially so

in the context of the strong commitment of early Canadian film to documentary projects

and a relatively late governmental investment in feature-film industry. This nationalist

project of articulation has unfolded in the context of a threefold dynamic of emergence:

1) the emergence of Canadian cinema against the United States’ cultural colonialism; 2)

the emergence of the Quebec cinema against the cultural colonialism emanating from

22

Anglo-Canada; and 3) the emergence of First Nations cinema against Canadian settler

political and cultural dominance after 1965 regionalization of the film industry.xx

The

administrative history of the Canadian cinema, and the post-1965 decentralization of

funding and production in particular, reflect a larger effort underway in Canada to

“reconfigure 'national' as a category by focusing on the local and specific in Canada's

diverse regions" (Gittings 2002:89). They are one testimony to a more general movement

from an universalist to multiculturalist perspective on the nation within Canadian public

discourse and its constitutional documents. The focus has shifted from the whole to the

parts, from the nation to the federation. But integration remains the ultimate goal, only

the strategy has changed to de-emphasize the universal and the national in favor of the

particular, the regional, the diverse.

Atanarjuat. The Fast Runner is well positioned to serve the needs of the Canadian

national cinema developing in the age of multiculturalism. Inuit video and film

productions, along with other work by minority filmmakers, contribute to an ongoing

Canadian effort to shape a national cinema by locating Canada’s diverse communities

within the imagined national community. Kunuk’s video and cinematographic project

testify to a changing politics of national community, of insider- and outsidership. The

early video work in all its aspects of production, distribution and exhibition was

addressed to the Inuktitut speaking Inuit audience. But Atanarjuat. The Fast Runner

targets Southern and global viewers even as it taunts them with the opening line of

demarcation between those who already know the tale and those who do not, the

banishing of English or French to the subtitles as well as the openly anti-integrationist

tenor of the tale. In a way similar to the early films in Quebec which were produced by

23

Anglophones and then translated into French, The Fast Runner also moved between

Inuktitut and English at different stages of its production, only to ultimately employ a

minority language rather than a national one. The point here is to overcome the cultural

and linguistic split not by institution of a common language, not in a patently

integrationist mode in other words, but by an enactment of a national cinematic project

that embodies the nation as a federation of linguistically and culturally distinct societies.

Kunuk’s film delivers multicultural Canada to Canadians, precisely when it offers the

Inuit the story of their origins and their modernity told in Inuktitut rather than English (or

French).

But it still delivers more. That the political economy of Canadian film production

has to be considered in the context of British and American hegemony further informs the

success of The Fast Runner. Canada's film industry has embraced the film because it

could be presented as Canada’s indigenous film, solidifying the national canon by

offering a film that in its subject matter, production and exhibition is unlike standard

Hollywood fare. Ironically, the film marks Canadian authenticity, even though it

emphatically intended, if we give the film’s producers automatic authority here, to mark

an alternative cultural sensibility: the Inuit world shown through the Inuit eyes. As much

as it is an Inuit claim to simultaneous cultural distinctiveness and embeddedness in

Canada’s modernity, it is also Canada's claim to the former. One kind of difference, that

is Inuit specificit, is appropriated as another kind of difference, now marking Canada’s

cultural specificity against American hegemony.xxi

Ideological functions of what I singled out as the film’s fundamental formal

gesture, then? Ultimately, the juxtaposition of the outtakes and the main narrative

24

embodies the predicament of indigenous art in contemporary multicultural democracies,

such as Canada and Australia where multiculturalism has been constitutionalized, but

also the United States where it governs much of the nation’s public imaginary as well as a

good share of its institutions. This juxtaposition enacts the Jamesonian moment of the

ideological and utopian, where the hegemonic and subversive coexist in their

contradiction (Jameson 1981 and 1990). It embodies the contradictions inherent in

indigenous art’s efforts to engage the politics of recognition; it also functions as a formal

solution to these otherwise insurpassable contradictions. This solution is counterintuitive,

because Atanarjuat. The Fast Runner foregrounds rather than covers up the contradiction

between resistance and cooptation. To read the outtakes as a straightforward assertion of

rhetorical sovereignty would paper over the very contradictions embedded in the exercise

of such indigenous agency under the conditions of contemporary multicultural

democracies, which, in the context of indigenous history, continue to be colonial states.

Therefore the awareness of “the cunning of recognition” has to complement any

sovereignty-oriented reading, if the entire extent of The Fast Runner’s ideological

investment and entanglement is to be apprehended.

More than a straightforward claim of the Inuit right to represent their usable past

in a gesture of asserting cultural autonomy, the outtakes underscore the mythical status of

the main narrative and by doing so insist on the recreation/reproduction of cultural

practices rather than their unproblematic accessibility to those appropriately located.

They expose the idea of indigeneity as a performance necessitated by the politics of

recognition and intended to secure concrete political and material gains, such as a voting

majority in Nunavut and asserted title to a portion of original Inuit land, for example. The

25

point, of course, is not to suggest a simple cause-effect relationship, but rather to indicate

the entire ideological field within whose constraints the film must operate. So here’s an

illustration of a terribly vicious circle: a need to perform cultural difference in order to

gain recognition, which in turns precipitates official incorporation into the state and its

capitalist economy, which, in yet another turn, results in an erasure of any meaningful

difference (that is difference in social and economic arrangements) behind the screen of

difference performed. The contest over difference is reduced to the field of culture only,

bearing out Slavoj Zizek’s (1997) point about multiculturalism and its compulsion to

represent cultural differences as a smoke screen for the ongoing process of global

homogenization characteristic of the age of multinational capital.

The point is not, let me insist, that Atanarjuat. The Fast Runner fails as a gesture

of rhetorical sovereignty, and that this is a bad thing. Rather, the point is that by

intimating the entire extent of its contradictory ideological investments, Kunuk’s film

specifies the possibilities and constraints of indigenous self-representation in the present.

It actively invites fantasies of the return to uncontaminated indigenous past and the

possibility of what Achin Vanaik (1997) has described as primary resistance—only to

dispel them. Instead, Kunuk’s film posits indigeneity as a cultural performance in the

name of specific cultural projects, which in turn fulfill multiple ideological functions for

the indigenous nations, as well as for the nation-states which these nations inhabit. It also

makes clear, though, that simple acknowledgement of this implication is only the

beginning of our critical work. Resistance and cooptation: how do we tell the difference

between the two? Do we need to? Sitting Bull spent a season riding in Buffalo Bill’s

Wild West.

26

Monika Siebert is an assistant professor of English at Syracuse University, where she

teaches contemporary American literature and culture and Native American studies. She

is at work on Indians Paying Indian?: North American Indigenous Art in the Age of

Multiculturalism.

i Inuit word for “friend.” ii All the quotations in this paragraph are from the Olympic Emblem’s official website:

http://www.vancouver2010.com/emblem/emblem.html iii

Squamish are the original owners of the land on which the 2010 Olympic Games will

take place. iv

Incorporated in 1990 and based in Igloolik, a community of 1200 people on a small

island in the north Baffin region of the Canadian Arctic. v All quotations in this paragraph are from Isuma Productions Inc. website:

http://www.isuma.ca. vi

Inuktitut is the mother tongue of the Canada’s Eastern Arctic Inuit. vii

“Southern” is typically used by the Inuit to refer to Canadian, or more broadly

American peoples living South of the Canadian Eastern Arctic. But it also can be taken to

refer to a specific though broad cultural formation, we call, in other contexts, “The West”

or “Europe.” viii

This reading presumes a Southern, non-Inuit, non-Inuktitut speaking viewer.

Anecdotal evidence I was able to gather about Inuit reception of the film emphasized

recognition rather than disorientation. ix

Such as Greg Sarris and Dan Sakheim’s Grand Avenue (1996), Sherman Alexie’s The

Business of Fancydancing (2002), Adrian Louis’s and Chris Eyre’s Skins (2002), Alexie

and Eyre’s Smoke Signals (1996), Valerie Red-Horse and Jennifer Farmer’s Naturally

Native (1997), Shelley Niro’s Honey Moccasins (1998), Randy Readroad’ The Doe Boy

(2001) or Blackhorse Lowe’s The 5th

World (2004). x Norman Cohen, the Isuma Productions cinematographer and the company’s

shareholder, is the exception to the all-Inuit cast. xi

As is the case with almost all Canadian productions Kunuk’s film was partially funded

by the Canada’s National Film Board. See Gittings and White on the somewhat

complicated history of this funding. xii

In yet another ironic twist, the medicine is seal oil, only now packaged in the Southern

pharmacy bottle. xiii

A good example would be Kenneth Turan writing for the Los Angeles Times that

“what’s special about The Fast Runner is that by its epic close, the select group [of he

understanding listeners to an ancient tale] includes us.” xiv

Deborah Miranda on the ASAIL listserve, March 4, 2004. Also see Alfred.

27

xv

See San Juan, Alfred, Povinelli and Samson. xvi

The Canadian government’s term for this is “non-status,” referring to a nation that

never signed historic treaties with Britain or Canada. xvii

An official term used in Canada “for the cancellation of the sovereignty over

territories or 'Aboriginal title' of Native people” (Samson 2003:9). xviii

Such as shifting the control over the lands protected by native title to the Canadian

goverment, or, the shift from state administration of the indigenous communities to their

self-administration via the concept of self-government. xix

This dynamic operates in a particularly categorical way in Australia. In the United

States and Canada, land claims have to be underwritten by indigenous identity as testified

to by federally recognized tribal enrollment lists. There’s no legal requirement to

demonstrate a continuing adherence to traditional lifeways. However, the logic of cultural

distinctiveness and authenticity established with reference to earlier forms of

tribal/national organizations operates unimpeded within the public discourse on

indigeneity in North America. xx

For a comprehensive history of Canadian cinema see Gittings. xxi

That a screening of Kunuk’s film in Washington, DC, at First Nations/First Features

showcase in May 2005, was funded by and took place in the Canadian Embassy, is only

one of the latest examples of this dynamic.

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